


On Infatuation (A Case Study)

by The Key of MGY (cdessler)



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, M/M, Meet-Cute, shameless fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-27
Updated: 2018-08-27
Packaged: 2019-07-03 08:49:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15815517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cdessler/pseuds/The%20Key%20of%20MGY
Summary: Harry Goodsir, newly-minted postgraduate student at the University of Edinburgh, had a plan for his immediate future. It did not include developing a crush on a girl with a ukulele. Unfortunately...





	On Infatuation (A Case Study)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CalamityBean](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CalamityBean/gifts).



Harry Goodsir, newly-minted postgraduate student at the University of Edinburgh, had a plan for his immediate future.

It went something like this:

  1. Settle in with his roommates. (His older brother, John, had found him a spot in a flatshare with three of his fellow medical students. Alex was the cheerful sort, easy to talk to and always ready to offer a spot of advice; John was the silent but solid type; Stephen was taciturn to the point of blatant rudeness. All in all, not a terribly bad bunch. Harry could do a lot worse, he knew. For starters, he could still be living at home, back in Anstruther, with his _younger_ brothers. He’d had quite enough of that, thanks.)
  2. Find a good coffee shop or cafe to haunt in the afternoons while he studied. (It wasn’t as if he wanted — or _needed_ , Stephen be damned — to spend as much time away from the flat as possible. He just preferred to do his studying away from distractions such as the telly, carelessly curated iPod playlists set to shuffle, and high-speed internet. Call him old-fashioned, but writing out his notes by hand had always helped him learn better. Plus, spending so much time in a public setting, surrounded by other people, gave him plausible deniability when it came to the old chestnut of _all work and no play means Harry Goodsir has no concept of a social life_.)
  3. Apply himself to his studies with the same dedication and enthusiasm he had displayed over the course of earning his first two degrees, both for love of the subject and in hopes of fast-tracking himself to a junior conservatorship, perhaps. Or even — in his wilder dreams — a university research position. He could do it. He _knew_ he could. John was already a lecturer with the School of Biomedical Sciences, and Harry was said to be just as promising an academic as his brother, so why _not_ have a doctorate and a solid body of publications under his belt before he turned thirty?



What he had _not_ included in his exhaustively thought-out framework of goals to meet for the future was:

      4. Being struck with a sudden and acute case of infatuation only a few weeks into the winter term.

And yet. Here he was. Sitting in the same chair at the same table in the inexplicably-named Hard Tack Coffee Shop for the twenty-second consecutive day in a row, a book on marine taxonomy mostly forgotten in front of him, listening to a young woman play the ukulele as raptly as if she were Niccolo Paganini drawing a bow across the strings of a Stradivarius violin.

This was highly irregular. He wasn’t _like_ this. Harry had never been the sort of person to have his head turned by a pretty girl — in fact, he couldn’t immediately think of a single instance where he had ever _noticed_ a girl as being anything more than a fellow human being, even in his teenage years, when the vast majority of his schoolmates had been far more interested in getting into each others’ pants than in their exam scores. Getting laid had not been high on his list of priorities. Neither had dating _without_ getting laid, to be quite honest, though he _had_ gone with a friend to the school dance once. And there was absolutely _nothing_ wrong with that attitude, thank you very much. Was it really so awful to think of women as people and friends first, and potential romantic partners… not so much at all?

It caught him some flack from time to time. But that was okay. He had more important things to focus on. Like narrowing down suitable topics for his PhD thesis. Except apparently not so much, anymore, because whenever this girl took to the microphone nothing else in the world existed for Harry Goodsir. And she was steadily coming to occupy more and more of his thoughts even when she wasn’t singing like a folk music angel descended from Heaven itself. He didn’t even _like_ folk music. Or he’d thought he didn’t. Maybe he only liked folk music when _she_ was singing it. _Maybe_ it was time to admit to himself that he now had a serious problem. For the first time in his life, he had a _crush_. And he had absolutely no idea of what to do about it.

_Oh my God, guys!_ he could practically hear his younger brother, Robert, crowing. _Harry **can** think with his dick!_

_I am **not** thinking with my dick!_ he would retort, while no doubt blushing an extremely unflattering shade of red to the tips of his ears. _I’m… I… I-I’m not thinking at all, really…_

Because honestly, there was no logic, no rhyme, no reason to this stupid crush of his. He didn’t know anything about her, other than the fact that she always came to sing at the coffee shop’s open mic nights on Friday and Saturday nights. (His research — if you called it _research_ , Harry’s twenty-two straight days of occupying an armchair at the big table in the back corner sounded more _collecting anthropological data in the field_ and less _lovestruck loser_ — seemed to indicate she never visited otherwise.) He didn’t even know her name, for God’s sake. So _why_ on Wegener’s tectonic Earth was he acting like this? For all he knew, the two of them could have wholly incompatible personalities. She could be into clubbing

— _not bloody likely if she’s singing in a coffee shop on a Friday night, she’d be **at the club** instead of here --_

or, or Will Ferrell movies

— _so much for date nights, Harry_ , John would say sympathetically, and Robert would quip in return, _**your** idea of a ‘date night’ is going up Arthur’s Seat with Edward to look for snails_ , at which point John would turn as beet red as Harry had just done in the course of his imaginings, but at least his brothers would no longer be discussing _his_ love life —

or, and this was very likely, merely find someone who wanted to study tiny shrimp for a living to be an utter bore, and want nothing to do with him. Most people outside his chosen field thought that way. Why should this (talented, captivating, beautiful) young woman be any different?

He probably shouldn’t do anything about this stupid crush at all. He would only, inevitably, end up making a complete arse of himself. And he had no one who he could turn to for advice. John was useless in that department, Robert was a pest, he would _not_ be asking his sister anything of the sort, and really, Harry just honestly preferred to keep his siblings out of it so that disqualified his remaining two brothers. He didn’t feel he knew his flatmates — or his fellow postgraduate students in the department — well enough yet to gauge whether approaching _them_ would be a good idea. His friends from back home were scattered far and wide now, and… he didn’t particularly feel like hitting any of them up via text for advice, either, for much the same set of reasons he was avoiding his family. The inevitable flurry of excitement ( _wait you’re **not** asexual???_ ) and the barrage of questions ( _who is she? what’s she like?_ ) it would prompt wasn’t a circus he felt like dealing with.

Obviously, this left Harry with no choice but to seek guidance from the barista.

Today that barista happened to be Tom, a cheerfully polite young man who had charge of the espresso machine most nights. He also, objectively, had the prettiest eyes of any person Harry had ever met. Women had to be throwing themselves at his feet for that alone. (But it helped that he was also easy to talk to and seemed quite intelligent.) Surely he would plenty of experience with the fairer sex. That he wouldn’t mind imparting some of his gained wisdom on. Right? _Right?_

(This was going to be an unqualified disaster.)

“Grande green tea?” Tom asked, over the top of the espresso machine, as Harry approached the counter. Twenty-three consecutive days had given him more than enough opportunity to settle into a routine of ordering specific drinks at specific times, and Tom -- like all good baristas -- had long since memorized it. Harry’s last call beverage of choice was green tea. No sense in consuming more caffeine after dinner unless he absolutely had to pull an all-nighter. Tonight was no such occasion, unless the inevitable lying awake in bed while berating himself for being an idiot counted.

“Yes, please,” Harry replied, digging his wallet out of his back pocket; and, while Tom turned to fetch the appropriate canister of tea leaves, silently worked his mouth in repeated, aborted attempts to open it and force a coherent string of words to issue forth. He must have been making a truly exceptional face, because the next time Tom glanced over at him, the other man paused and quirked an eyebrow. Harry could feel his cheeks heating up.

“You alright, mate?” Tom laughed, after another few seconds passed in embarrassed silence.

“The girl who plays the ukulele on weekends,” he said in a rush, as the heat on his cheeks began crawling towards his ears. “You know her, right? I mean… um… that is…”

“Can I put in a good word for you?” Tom was still grinning, now clearly amused, and Harry found himself wishing a chasm would conveniently open itself beneath his feet and swallow him whole. “Sure. I’ll give her your number, too, if you want.”

“ _No!_ ” Harry blurted. Then he grimaced. That had been slightly loud. In a calmer tone of voice that he absolutely did not feel, he continued, “No, no. Thank you but no. I just--” His eyes darted from side to side, making certain no one was paying attention to them; then he leaned in slightly and asked, “Do you maybe have any advice? On how to approach her. I don’t know the first thing about her, but… I-I’d like to? And I’m rubbish at this sort of thing. Talking to women, I mean.”

_Talking to **anyone**_ , he thought sourly. At least the Pycnogonids couldn’t judge him for being socially inept. He ought to have kept to his studies and not opened his big stupid mouth.

Pouring hot water over the tea strainer he’d situated in one of the shop’s grande-size mugs, Tom huffed. “I’m not any better at it.”

Harry boggled. Seriously? With _those_ eyes?

Tom glanced up at him again, and his grin only widened when he saw how Harry’s expression had changed. “Women aren’t my type.”

Oh. _Oh_. Well, _shit_. Who was he supposed to ask for advice _now_? The only other customers currently in the shop were John Bridgens and Harry Peglar, quietly discussing their book of the week over lattes; Harry Goodsir might be largely clueless, but he wasn’t _such_ a social infant that he couldn’t recognize true love when it was sat in front of his face on a weekly basis. The two of them wouldn’t know how to talk to women any more than Tom apparently did. Or didn’t, rather. _Shit_.

“Don’t look like that,” Tom said, still quite cheerful, as he set the mug on a saucer with a spoon and carefully moved it over to the register. “Women, men, it doesn’t actually matter, does it? Just ask her about her music. You _do_ know _that_ about her. It’s what I would do, if I wanted to ask out that bloke with the sideburns who always reads poetry -- ask him about his poetry.”

“Maybe.” Trying to muster some amount of control over the hangdog expression his face had sunk into, Harry handed him a five-pound note and pulled the saucer closer. Then he blinked, tilting his head curiously. “... _do_ you want to ask him out? The poetry bloke.”

(They’d exchanged enough small talk over the course of their transactions that he was reasonably certain he could ask such a question without being horrifically out of line.)

Tom winked at him. “Maybe.”

Harry gave him what was meant to be an encouraging smile, but more than likely came off looking awkward in the extreme. “Good luck with that, then. And… thanks.”

_I guess?_

He returned to his armchair, his books, and his binder of loose-leaf paper, feeling a bit despondent but determined to power through it. Crushes were a silly waste of time, anyway. They were superficial and fleeting by their very nature. This too would pass.

Right. Pycnogonids. Where had he been again?

\-- in a state of complete and utter discombobulation, because the bells above the coffee shop’s door had just jangled as it opened and when he looked up it was to see _the object of his silly waste of time walking in_.

Harry’s heart crashed up into his throat at the same time as his stomach dropped straight through the floor and his teeth fused themselves together. Oh _shit_. Shit fuck damn _hell_. Twenty-three days of not-so-vaguely hoping and waiting and she chose _now_ to make a visit on a non-open mic night? And not only _now_ , but _right now_? _Right after_ he’d made a massive fool of himself asking the barista for advice? Oh, God, he was going to die. This was horrible. He needed that chasm to open beneath him _ten minutes ago_. What did he _do_?

Bury his face in his taxonomy book, keep his head down, and hope the heat his ears were giving off wasn’t tangible all the way across the shop at the ordering counter. That was probably the most advisable course of action. Especially seeing as his tongue seemed to have swelled to twice its normal size while simultaneously turning to sand and his teeth were definitely stuck together. Saying the wrong things wasn’t going to be a problem if he couldn’t say anything, period.

Over the top of the espresso machine, Tom was very deliberately and over-exaggeratedly waggling his eyebrows. His message was clear: _Here’s your chance! Talk to her!_

_No no no no no!_ Just as deliberately, Harry took a gulp of his tea, and nearly dropped it when the near-scalding liquid hit his tongue. (Well, there went the sand in his mouth. Unfortunately, it was taking the top layer of skin there with it. First degree burn, a likely check.) The mug landed on the saucer with a clatter.

Ukulele Girl took no notice, as she greeted Tom with a small smile -- the barista, having slipped effortlessly into his unassigned role of wingman, greeted her back with no indication that he’d just been sending silent signals to the hapless idiot in the back corner -- and took a moment to consider the menu board.

Harry tried to pick up his pen, somehow managed to flip it in the air before getting a solid grip on it, and stared furiously at his textbook while breathing deeply through his nose. Pycnogonids. _Pycnogonids_. There were some genera of a dubious nature in that particular class of marine arthropods. He was thinking of giving them a thorough investigation, just to clear up the dubiousness, if he could. They weren’t tiny shrimp, they were actually sea spiders, and sort of horrifying to look at in all honesty so scientists tended to stick with the shrimp -- at least this was his theory -- was dubiousness even a word? Had he just made up a word? Would studying sea spiders just doom him to being eternally single? Why did he even care about being eternally single? Tiny shrimp might be boring, but some of the Pycnogonids were the stuff of _nightmares_ \-- legs _two feet long_ \--

A presence made itself known across the table from him. Harry looked up, and found himself wondering what his flatmates might have to say about sudden heart failure in the under-thirty age bracket.

Ukulele Girl was smiling at him. “Tom said you were interested in my music?”

_Tom wants to have a death on the premises_. “Yff,” Harry said.

Much like the barista had just a few minutes before, she huffed a quiet laugh of amusement. “Sorry?”

With supreme effort (and a bit of pain), Harry swallowed and got his teeth unstuck. “Yes. Um, yes, I am. It’s folk music, isn’t it? I don’t like it”

\-- _wow, amazing, what a great way to make a good first impression, you’re doing great, Harry_ \--

“Usually, I don’t like it usually, but… I like yours? You have a very good voice,” he finished, feeling like he had achieved the pinnacle of idiocy, and as if his ears were about to burst into actual flames.

Thankfully, Ukulele Girl either didn’t notice or didn’t mind. (It had to be the latter. There was no way she could _not_ notice how flustered he was.) “Thank you,” she replied, still smiling, and she sounded genuine enough. “I’ve been taking lessons to work on my range. Sounds like it’s been paying off?”

Harry nodded vigorously. And then winced internally at the level of vigor.

“I write my own music,” she was continuing. “I suppose if I _had_ to give it a genre label, I would pick folk, but I don’t like labels. I like the simplicity of a single instrument, and I write from my heart. Restricting myself to a single genre or style has never been my intent.”

It was clear that this was a topic she felt very passionate about; a light had sparked in her eyes, and she’d begun gesturing with her hands as she talked.

Harry was entranced.

(Other people’s enthusiasm about their interests had always been something he enjoyed seeing. His brother John could make anatomy interesting to _anyone_ , and Edward was particularly fond of natural history; even Robert, sarcastic as he was, had his favorite little areas of study. They just looked so… _happy_ , when they got on a roll. He liked seeing people happy. It was one of life’s little pleasures, in his estimation.)

“Maybe… that’s why I like it,” he ventured. “You don’t think of it as folk music, and it shows when you perform.”

“Maybe. Or maybe there’s something in the music that speaks to you?”

_It’s not the music_ , a little voice in Harry’s head, that sounded suspiciously like Robert, quipped.

He blinked to brush it aside. Then, completely against his better judgment, he tentatively repeated what he could remember of the first song he’d heard her perform, in a halting, sing-song sort of voice. “There’s a room - full of you - in the place - where I awake from…”

It _had_ spoken to him, but he couldn’t say exactly _why_. Only that the words and the melody had stuck in his head long after he had gone home that night, echoing in the cavern of his mind, making him feel like he was _missing_ something. But what, he didn’t know. He’d never felt anything like it before; therefore, it was confusing as hell.

Christ. Maybe _that_ was why he had fixated on her. She made him feel like his perfectly ordered and planned-out life was missing a mysterious _something_.

_It’s missing your having gotten laid_ , Robert’s voice supplied helpfully.

_Get lost_ , Harry snapped. _Go read a book on Scottish heraldry. I’m **trying** to have a serious conversation here_.

_Love you, big brother_ , Robert said, and went silent.

Across the table, Ukulele Girl’s eyes had softened, and she was regarding him with a slight tilt of the head, as if analyzing what his choice of song and lyric said about him. Harry tried not to squirm, and wasn’t entirely successful.

“Is there someone you miss?” she asked, gently.

“No,” he replied. And it was an honest answer, because there _wasn’t_ someone he missed. There really wasn’t. Not in the way the song implied. “I just thought… it seemed very sad. But you don’t look like a sad person. Not that you aren’t,” he added hurriedly. “I mean--”

“Large green tea to go,” Tom called out from behind the counter; where Ukulele Girl couldn’t see it, he gave Harry a double thumbs-up and a big grin.

“That’s me,” she said, and stood from her seat. Pausing, she asked, “What’s your name?”

Suddenly, his mouth was all sand and stuck teeth again. “H-Harry,” he squeaked.

She smiled down at him, an almost mischievous little spark lighting in her eyes. “I’m Silna. I’ll see you on Friday?”

“Absolutely,” he blurted, as his teeth broke apart. This time Harry couldn’t hide his cringing reaction to his own ineptitude, but her smile only widened, beaming with gentle good humor.

“Harry,” she repeated. “See you then. Take care.”

He was too tongue-tied to reply further, as she went to collect her drink -- Tom appeared to be practically vibrating with excitement over the fact that they’d ordered the same kind of tea, as if this meant their meeting was ordained in the stars, and and was waggling his eyebrows in a meaningful manner again -- and walked out into the Edinburgh night.

_Silna_ , he thought, turning the syllables over in his head, silently pronouncing them in turn. _What a pretty name. Oh my God, she knows my name. She’ll be looking for me on Friday. Oh my God._

“Mate,” Tom said loudly, from his place behind the espresso machine, “I hate to break it to you, but you have got it _bad_. I haven’t seen heart eyes that huge since those two first got together.”

“Thank you, Tom,” John Bridgens said pleasantly, without looking up from the open book on his knee, while Harry Peglar smothered a smile in a sip of his latte.

Harry Goodsir was so pleased with his unexpected success that he couldn’t even find it in himself to be mortified that the barista had just made his silly little crush public knowledge. Maybe this unwanted case study in infatuation _wouldn’t_ turn out to be such an unadulterated disaster after all.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for CalamityBean for the Terror Fan Exchange on Tumblr, combination of three prompts: "Goodsir x Silna modern AU, meet cute with fluff", "Bridgens x Peglar, sharing/discussing literature; can be canon setting or AU, happy or sad", and "Goodsir x Silna + lyrics to "Room" by Nive and the Deer Children". 
> 
> I apologize for how late it is. I haven't been well, and that is all I can say for myself.
> 
> I gave myself two challenges for this fic: to cram in as many modern AU scenarios as possible (therefore you get a modern university AU set in a coffee shop) and to do no research whatsoever. (If you know me at all, you will realize this is akin to waterboarding myself.) My own experiences as a barista with regular customers, and as a graduate student at a British university, were my sources of inspiration. The coffee shop is loosely based on a cafe in Bristol I liked to visit. 
> 
> Unbeta'd and largely unedited. All mistakes are my own.


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